About the Book
Sindhu-Sarasvati
Civilization: New Perspectives. A Volume in Memory of Dr Shikaripur
Ranganatha Rao is a compilation of the papers presented at the
International Conference on the Sindhu-Sarasvati Civilization: A Reappraisal held in Loyola
Marymount University, Los Angeles, during 21-22 February 2009. Here, eminent
archaeologists, philologists, anthropologists and historians re-examine recent
researches and existing theories upon the nature of the interrelation between
the two most ancient pre- historic cultures of the South Asian subcontinent:
the Indus (Sindhu or Harappan
Civilization) and the Vedic Civilization. The scholars touch upon areas of
consensus and contentions, with a tentatively conclusive inter- disciplinary
understanding about the pluralistic culture and shared identity of the two riverine cultures between 3000 and 1500 BCE.
They rightly swing the balance of the argument away
from the archaic and now exploded Aryan Invasion Theory to the well-grounded
Vedic Sarasvati milieu as the home of the Harappan Civilization. Thus it opens a new window to the
cultural content of the prehistoric period of the subcontinent.
The eminent personalities that have contributed
include Ashok Aklujkar, Shiva G. Bajpai,
Giacomo Benedetti, R.S. Bisht,
Edwin Bryant, Michel Danino, Subhash
Kak, Robin Bradley Kar, Nicholas Kazanas, Mark [onathan Kenoyer, Prem Kishore Saint, Jim J. Shaffer, Diane A. Lichtenstein, Shrikant Talageri, Lavanya Vamsani as well as Sundara Adiga, S.R. Rao, and Nalini Rao.
This volume is poised to evoke keen interest among
archaeologists, re- searchers, historians and students of history and
archaeology.
About the Author
Nalini N. Rao, Ph.D. in Art History (UCLA) and Ph.D. in Ancient History and
Archaeology (University of Mysore) is Professor of World Art in Soka University of America, Aliso
Viejo, CA, USA. She is the author of many books, some of which include Royal
Imagery and Networks of Power at Vijayanagara: A
Study of Kingship in South India (2010), Sangama:
A Confluence of Art and Culture during the Vijayanagara
Period (ed. N.
Rao 2005), Contours of Modernity: An Exhibition of
Contemporary Indian Art (N. Rao and Debashish Banerji,
2005), Boundaries and Transformations: Masterworks of
Indian and South East Asian Sculptures from the Collection of Dr. and Mrs.
William Price (1997),
Belur (1979, 1990), and Sravanabelagola (1980). She is the
Chairperson of Dr. S.R. Rao Foundation for Indian Archaeology, Art and Culture.
Foreword
The memorial volume honouring Dr S.R. Rao had its
origins in a conference on “Sindhu- Sarasvati Valley Civilization” held at Loyola Marymount
University, USA, on 21-22 February 2009. It was sponsored by the Bridge Builder
Endowment of the Loyola Marymount University and Nalanda
International, both of which I have the good fortune of founding and
supporting. The conference was meant to be a reappraisal featuring the most
recent research on the subject, looked at from different disciplines, but it
was also meant to be a felicitation for Dr S.R. Rao, who was eighty-seven years
old that year, and had travelled to Los Angeles from India to attend the
conference. At eighty- seven, he was remarkably well kept and his mind was as
sharp as a razor. No one could forget his enormous contributions to our
understanding of this earliest civilization of South Asia, his discovery of a
large number of its sites, his revolutionary excavation of the port city of Lothal in the 1950s and 1960s, his opening of the field of
Marine Archaeology and its use to establish the existence of Krsna’s underwater city of Dvaraka
in 1979-80 and his continuing work on the decipherment of the Sindhu- Sarasvati script, showing
it to be a Sanskritic language. On the occasion, Dr
Rao spoke of his most recent work on the script, with detailed reasoning on his
decipherments. In 2013, Dr Rao departed from the physical plane, but his legacy
continues in a many- directioned advance towards the
establishment of many of the intuitions he had about this civilization. This
volume represents some of that large body of work that continues in the vast
shade of his banyan-like erudition and eminence.
The essays here represent the state-of-the-art in
research on Sindhu-Sarasvati Civilization, an amazing
settlement which flourished 5,000 years ago, establishing itself as the largest
and most sophisticated urban culture in history. The ruins of this impressive
civilization are twice the size of the Egyptian and Sumerian societies
combined. The fact that these proto-historic remains exist today in two nations
separated by a common partition makes one pause to consider how so much of our
world is divided and even antagonized by differences of religion, economics,
philosophy and politics. It makes us rewind into our own origins and also fast
forward to the increasing Technological prowess of contemporary humans and
their ability to probe their own hidden pasts. If we travel thus back in time,
we discover that each of us comes from a common ancestry that makes us all
related. Through genetic studies, we know today, that the most distant we are
to anyone in the world is 50th cousin.
We could ponder our earliest ancestors originating
in Africa and imagine the first tribes of Homo sapiens migrating therefrom to
Asia, to India and on to Indonesia and further East. Concurrently, we would see
these same ancestors parting and migrating north to China and America in the
East and to Europe in the West. We could imagine how future generations from
this common origin began to divide into many tribes. Soon the tribes lost the
knowledge of their origin and taking each other to be different began warfare
for domination. Later, rulers arose with the imperial urge to control large
territories and many peoples, and spread into empires that colonized most of
the world. Abridged histories are written - often by the rulers of the time or
the nations that dominated those moments in our past. Still, these nations,
these civilizations all started as one.
As we return to recent times, our eagerness for
knowledge has brought us the discovery that we are all intimately connected.
Through the internet, cell phones and GPS systems, our physical and cultural
separations are giving way to the possibility of a knowledge
of unity. This ‘‘body of humanity” is expanding its awareness in every field of
human endeavour. The conference on the Sindhu-Sarasvati
Civilization was another example of this expansion of knowledge. Though
ostensibly we turned our gaze on the antiquity of South Asia, the ancestors of
the peoples of the Indian subcontinent, it was in reality another chapter of
the story of a common humanity that we gathered together to decipher, in the
spirit of Dr Rao’s archaeological excavations on
earth and sea, an excavation without bias for universal knowledge.
Both in piecing together the stories of the
different peoples of the earth, and in the disciplinary approaches taken to
piece together each of these stories, we resemble the
blind men of Hindustan spoken of in the Upanisads, each with their fixed belief
in their interpretation of the elephant that confronted them. This has been the
story of specialization in the modem world. But as we enter the twenty-first
century, we find ourselves embarking on a new curve of the circle, the inward
curve of integration. The way here is to collaborate and synthesize the results
of the varied knowledge workers, attempting to provide an integral description
from the piecemeal knowledge. Dr Rao set the example for this spirit, utilizing
varied tools, intuitional, hermeneutic, technological and cross-disciplinary to
arrive at a coherent understanding of the province of knowledge he set for
himself. The papers in this volume are marked by this spirit of synergy and
coherence. Evidence is probed for consistency; inconsistent results are
re-examined. Integration of diverse approaches obtained from
different fields of endeavour is attempted to bring forth the true image of the
invisible” elephant in the room”, the vast civilization that disappeared along
with the missing river Sarasvati.
Finally, though Dr Rao’s
death is a great loss for all of us, I am heartened to see so much goodwill and
enthusiasm among the present-day scholars who have submitted their research to
honour their great forerunner; and most of all, the work done by Dr Rao’s daughter, Dr Nalini Rao,
for her tireless efforts in approaching the scholars for the conference and
later editing their papers to consolidate the present volume. My thanks go out
to her. My thanks also to Prof. Debashish
Banerji, Executive Director of Nalanda
International for his organization and scholarship, which have gone into the
conference and this volume; and to Prof. Chris Chapple,
Doshi Professor at Loyola Marymount University, for
arranging for the conference venue and helping with the complex logistics.
Preface
Anyone who attended the international conference Sindhu-Sarasvati Valley Civilization: A Reappraisal”, held
in Los Angeles, California, USA on 21-22 February 2009, could not fail to be
impressed by the level of discussions, the scholarship of the speakers and the
enthusiastic support of the audience. The conference was about the nature of
the two most ancient prehistoric cultures of the South Asian subcontinent: the
Indus (Sindhu) or Harappan
Civilization, which has been solely reconstructed from archaeological material,
and the Vedic Civilization, largely known from Vedic literature preserved
through oral tradition. The aim of the conference was a reappraisal of the
place of Vedic culture within the Indus cultural system in the light of new
pieces of evidence. It was a search for an objective historical interpretation
that would provide a substantial understanding about the nature of
interrelation between the two cultures, an issue that has intrigued scholars
for the past fifty years. It was felt necessary to confront the issue of the
overlapping of the Indus Valley Civilization and Vedic culture, and let
prominent scholars re-examine recent research and
existing theories and arrive at a consensus. The presentees
in the conference included eminent archaeologists, philologists,
anthropologists, historians and specialists in religious studies whose
historical analysis was rooted in years of scholarship and fieldwork. They
touched upon areas of consensus and contentions, with a tentatively conclusive
interdisciplinary understanding revolving around the riverine
cultures of the Indus and Sarasvati. In other words,
it was centred upon primary archaeological and linguistic groups of evidence
that could throw light on the pluralistic culture between 3000 and 1500 BCE.
The specific issues examined ranged from origins to evolution dispersal,
ecology, genetics, language, socio-cultural identities and continuities between
the prehistoric and historic periods.
Those who participated in the conference do not by
any means exhaust the list of specialists. Many colleagues were unable to
participate but were kind enough to send their articles, which have been
included in the volume; needless to say the volume would have been incomplete
without their support. Our sincere appreciation to the participants: Ashok Aklujkar, Shiva Bajpai, RS. Bisht, Edwin
Bryant, Subhash Kak,
Jonathan Mark Kenoyer, S.R. Rao, Prem
Saint and [im G. Shaffer. Our sincere thanks
to the panel moderators, Damodar Sardesai,
Emeritus Prof. of History, UCLA, and Mathew, Dillon, of Loyola Marymount
University (LMU), William Fulco, Director of LMU’s
centre for Archaeology who were responsible for initiating an extended
discussion. Our sincere thanks also to Giacomo
Benedetti, Michel Danino, Robin Bradley Kar, Lavanya Vemsani,
Diane A. Lichtenstein and Shrikant Talageri who were kind enough to send their articles which
have been included. The conference was generously funded by Nalanda International, and we thank its founding director, Navin Doshi, and Pratima Doshi. My heartfelt
thanks to Christopher Chap pie, Professor of Religious Studies at LMU, who was
responsible for hosting the conference and to Debashish
Banerji for creating the website. I am particularly
grateful to Shiva Bajpai and Ashok Aklujkar for their constant support and guidance.
My role in the conference as its director was to
invite scholars, co-ordinate the topics and to provide a title to the
conference. In regard to the production of the book, I have merely collected
the written papers and handed them to the publisher without making any changes.
The abstracts of the papers have been written by the authors themselves and
vary in size as well. For the sake of convenience to readers, they have been
placed after the Introduction and not at the beginning of each paper. I have
allowed the articles to speak for themselves after providing a very brief
introduction to this complex topic. My initial objective was to publish a
felicitation volume to my father, Dr. S.R. Rao, since he has devoted his entire
life to archaeology. He knew that a Festschrift was going to be published in
his honour. However, unfortunately he did not live to actually hold a copy of
it in front of his eyes or in his hands. He was kind enough to send his
(already) published writing on Indus script and language, with certain
revisions. Thus it has been included in a separate section, “Something From and
About S.R. Rao”, which has a different format from the other papers in this
volume. In this section are included an article by Sundara
Adiga who has written about his reminiscences of S.R.
Rao and a brief note on S.R. Rao’s life and
personality by me.
The articles in the book have been arranged in
alphabetical order as they defy division into conventional sub-headings or
topics. The papers vary in size as the objective of the book was to allow
scholars to explain their findings in the best possible way, ensuring academic
freedom and objectivity. This is how my father taught me to view scholarship,
with respect and open-mindedness.
Introduction
The very title “Sindhu-Sarasvati
Civilization”, which we are not familiar with, draws attention to the fact that
there is a whole area of interpretive historical research that has evolved from
the earlier title of “Indus Valley and Vedic Civilizations”. It raises
questions as to whether it is necessary to rename the Indus Valley Civilization
as Sindhu-Sarasvati Civilization. The reason for such
a change lies in the gradual paradigm shift that has occurred (knowingly or
unknowingly) during the past fifty years due to the incredible advances in our
knowledge and pursuit of rigorous research by a variety of scholars:
archaeologists, anthropologists, philologists and historians. The secondary
literature has grown to be unwieldy, intriguing and extremely complex. This
volume, with its divergent opinion, comes at a crucial time when a cohesive,
updated picture of the earliest South Asian civilization is a necessity.
The title brings together two separate
civilizations, Indus and Vedic, that have been
interpreted as foreign vs. indigenous, superior vs. inferior, Aryan/Sanskritic vs. Dravidian, urban vs. rural, illiterate vs.
literate, respectively. However, a dramatic change in our understanding of this
shared civilization has occurred during the past decade. A brief historical
background of the contentious nature might help us to understand the
substantial issues that lie behind the paradigm shift.
The story of the beginnings of Indian civilization
is still told by Indians by recitations and repetitions of the word “Sarasvati”. On the banks of this river were composed many
of the Vedic hymns, among which the rgveda mentions the river Sarasvati more than sixty times as the most auspicious or
as deserving of the highest praise. Interpretation of the roots of Indian
civilization changed when it was announced that a more ancient civilization had
been discovered by Daya Ram Sahni and R.D. Banerjee and later excavated by Sir John Marshall (1922-31) and E.J.H. Mackay at Mohenjo-Daro and by Vats at Harappa.
While Marshall was inclined to name it Indo-Sumerian Civilization, Mackay
called it Harappa Civilization, as Harappa was the first site to be discovered.
However due to its marked differences from the Mesopotamian cities, Marshall
changed the title to Indus Civilization due to its proximity to the river
Indus.
However, even before the unearthing of the two
sites, in 1785, Sir William Jones discovered that a number of languages such as
Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Gothic, Celtic, Old German, and Persian had a common
origin. Hence he gave it the name Indo- European/Indo-Germanic languages. Thus
began a pursuit to locate the homeland of the Indo-European-speaking people
outside India which was fixed in South Russia/ Central Asia. With further
excavations at the two sites, there grew a desire to know the place of origin
of these languages, and their relation to Vedic culture. The latter with its
superior Sanskrit language and grammar led to the theory that one branch of
Indo- European language group probably left their homeland around 2000-1200 BCE, migrated to Iraq, Iran,
Baluchistan and settled in Sapta-Sindhu, the land of
seven rivers, where they composed the Rgveda. It was asserted that the
Indus Civilization was pre- Aryan and charged the Vedic Aryans with destroying
the urban cities of Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro on the river Indus. The Aryan
Invasion Theory (AIT) was archaeologically constructed on the basis of a few
skeletons reported to have been found scattered in Mohenjo-Daro and by relating
the rgvedic term pur to the fortifications in
Indus cities which were destroyed by invading Vedic Aryans.’ In the 1960s, a
careful examination revealed that neither did the skeletons belong to one and
same stratigraphical context nor was there any proof
of any massacre. Most of the skeletons positively showed that the few were
drowned in severe and sudden flood in the river and there was no evidence of
warfare; while the literary interpretation of the word pur was wrong thereby proving
that there was no battle between the Aryan and Dravidians. Linguistically, the
theory claimed that a group, speaking an Indo- Aryan language, a sub-branch of
the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European family of languages, had invaded
India in 1200 BCE
and imposed the
Sanskrit language. This led to the dating of the J3.gveda to c. 1500 BCE.2 However no such event has been recorded in the Vedas
or Puranas, Thus, with no literary or archaeological proof, or collective
memory, mythology or cult, the theory was proved to be misconstrued. In the
meantime its ramifications had been tremendous.
With the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947,
archaeological sites similar to Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro were discovered and
scientifically excavated in India, such as at Lothal,
Kalibangan. Chanhu-Daro, Rakhigarhi, Dholavira
and Surkotada. Almost 2,400 settlements came
to be known beyond the banks of the river Indus, and soon the Indus
Civilization came to be known as the Indus Valley Civilization. The Vedic-Harappan dichotomy was modified by Aryan Migration Theory,
which contended that there were no invaders but migrants in small batches at
different points of time and spread over a long duration and believed to have
migrated from Ukraine, through Ontic
steppes, Turkmenistan, northern Afghanistan to India. The migration theory
claimed that the dasas, panis of the Indus Civilization
were also outsiders and Indo-Aryan speakers, speaking a dialect different from
the one used by the Aryans.
Several archaeological cultures were identified with
the migrating Indo-European speakers on their way to India, such as Pit, Hut
and Early Timber and Andronovo cultures, but, more
importantly, the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological
Complex (BMAC). BMAC is a Bronze Age culture that was discovered during
archaeological excavations in the Bactria-Margiana area.’ Bactria includes the basis
of the Amu Darya or Oxus River in northern Afghanistan and adjacent
south-eastern Uzbekistan and Margiana, the deltaic
region of the river in south Turkmenistan. Proof of the migration of the
Indo-Europeans from BMAC was claimed to have been provided by artefacts in Mehrgarh-VIII and at Sibri
(typical of BMAC) and Jukar Culture of Sindh and Gangetic Copper Hoards.
The authors of the BMAC were believed to be the dasas and the destroyers of the
strongholds (puras) described in the J3.gveda, relating
to the Arya- Dasa wars in Central Asia.’ The BMAC and
related minor theories regarding the flow of the Sarasvati
in Afghanistan also negatively impacted the study of Indus Valley Civilization.
AIT had been proved as false as early as 1964 by Dales, Rao, Lal and rejected by Shaffer, Kenoyer,
Hemphill, Lukacs and Kennedy, Elst,
and Danino. With a shift towards the indigenous
nature of the civilization, an out of India theory arose which was expressed in
different ways. It held that the Rgveda was part of an earlier layer
of world civilization that flourished before the rise of ancient Egyptian,
Sumerian and Indus Valley Civilizations. Based on a more logical linguistic
interpretation are those who date the composition of the Rgveda to pre-3150 BCE. They propose that the
Mesopotamian cultures were the borrowers from Indian cultures particularly in
the use of bricks, rituals, astronomy, mathematics, writing, and mythological
concepts.
Meanwhile, in 1993 a dramatic
evidence in the form of lands at imagery exposed the palaeochannels
which provided a scientific evidence of the drying of the historical river Sarasvati, around 1900 BCE. This initiated a rethinking of existing theories by providing a firm
time-period to the origins, evolution and decline of the Indus/Vedic
civilization(s), thereby altering the paradigm of the debate. The discovery of
many more Indus Valley sites infused a new spirit into the controversy about
AIT. It was found that more Indus sites existed on the dry bed of river Sarasvati than on the river Indus. No longer were Indus
sites restricted to Indus Valley, but extended to Baluchistan with 129 sites
(belonging to Mature Phase), 108 in Sindh, 310 in
Gujarat, 60 in Pakistan Punjab, 360 sites on river Sarasvati.
In other words, about 32 per cent of the total sites were on the dry bed of the
Sarasvati basin which comprised of Harayana, Indian Punjab, north
Rajasthan and Cholistan. The correlation of the two
cultures in space and time initiated a change in the title, from Indus Valley
to Indus-Sarasvati Civilization, taking into
consideration the existence of a large number of Indus Valley sites on the
banks of the Sarasvati than on the Indus.” This piece
of scientific evidence buried the earlier theory, and shifted the focus to an
indigenous, singular civilization, whose origins and heartland were on the
river Sarasvati.
The discovery of the river Sarasvati
had important repurcussions for historical research.
It provided an incentive to re-examine the reasons for the location of 80 per
cent of nearly 2,600 archaeological sites. It helped to prove that the loss of Sarasvati was later than the Vedic age, thereby
contradicting AIT. In addition, it showed that the J3.gveda must have been composed not
in 1500 BCE (after the drying of the
river around 1900 BCE,
but must have
been composed while the river was still flowing, joined by its tributaries,
Yamuna and Sutlej, which should be nearer 2000 BCE or even earlier, as the river was in full flow in
about 3000 BCE. This analysis has been made
possible primarily
Contents
|
Foreword
- Navin Doshi |
v-vii |
|
Preface |
ix-x |
|
Introduction
- Nalini Rao |
1-7 |
|
Abstracts |
8-17 |
|
Part I |
|
|
Something From and About
S.R. Rao |
|
1. |
The
Language and Script of the Indus Civilization |
19-62 |
|
-
S.R. Rao |
|
2. |
S.R. Rao’s Academic Personality: My Reminiscences |
63-73 |
|
- Sundara Adiga |
|
3. |
Dr
S.R. Rao As I Knew Him |
74-88 |
|
- Nalini Rao |
|
|
Part II |
|
|
Articles |
|
4. |
Sarasvati Drowned: Rescuing Her from Scholarly Whirlpools |
89-187 |
|
-
Ashok Aklujkar |
|
5. |
“Sapta Sindhusu”: The Land of
Seven Rivers: A New Interpretation and Its Historical Significance |
188-219 |
|
-
Shiva G. Bajpai |
|
6. |
The
Chronology of Puranic Kings and Rgvedic
Rsis in Comparison with the Phases of the Sindhu-Sarasvati Civilization |
220-246 |
|
- Giacomo Benedetti |
|
7. |
The
Debate on Indo-Aryan Origins: Malleability and Circularity |
247-264 |
|
-
Edwin Bryant |
|
8. |
How Harappans
Honoured Death at Dholavira |
265-318 |
- R.S. Bisht |
||
9. |
New Findings in Harappan Town Planning and Metrology |
319-339 |
- Michel Danino |
||
10. |
Time, Space and Structure in
Ancient India |
340-355 |
- Subhash
Kak |
||
11. |
The Riverine-Agricultural
Argument for the Indo-European |
356-470 |
Nature of the Indus Valley
Civilization |
||
- Robin Bradley Kar |
||
12. |
Rgveda
Pre-dates the Sarasvatt-Sindhu Culture |
471-499 |
- Nicholas Kazanas |
||
13. |
New Perspectives on the Indus
Tradition: Contributions |
500-535 |
from Recent Research at Harappa
and Other Sites in |
||
Pakistan and India |
||
- Jonathan Mark Kenoyer |
||
14. |
Paleohydrology of the Sindhu-Sarasvati Civilization |
536-555 |
River Systems |
||
- Prem
Kishore Saint |
||
15. |
Settlement Dynamics in Ancient
India: |
556-571 |
Continuity vs. Discontinuity |
||
- Jim G. Shaffer and Diane A.
Lichtenstein |
||
16. |
The Sindhu-Sarasvati
Civilization alias the |
572-593 |
Indo-Iranian Civilization |
||
- Shrikant
Talageri |
||
17. |
Genetic Evidence of Early Human
Migrations in the |
594-621 |
Indian Ocean Region Disproves
Aryan Migration/Invasion |
||
Theories: An Examination of
Small-statuted Human Groups of the Indian Ocean
Region |
||
- Lavanya
Vamsani |
||
Contributors |
622-630 |
|
Index |
631-664 |
About the Book
Sindhu-Sarasvati
Civilization: New Perspectives. A Volume in Memory of Dr Shikaripur
Ranganatha Rao is a compilation of the papers presented at the
International Conference on the Sindhu-Sarasvati Civilization: A Reappraisal held in Loyola
Marymount University, Los Angeles, during 21-22 February 2009. Here, eminent
archaeologists, philologists, anthropologists and historians re-examine recent
researches and existing theories upon the nature of the interrelation between
the two most ancient pre- historic cultures of the South Asian subcontinent:
the Indus (Sindhu or Harappan
Civilization) and the Vedic Civilization. The scholars touch upon areas of
consensus and contentions, with a tentatively conclusive inter- disciplinary
understanding about the pluralistic culture and shared identity of the two riverine cultures between 3000 and 1500 BCE.
They rightly swing the balance of the argument away
from the archaic and now exploded Aryan Invasion Theory to the well-grounded
Vedic Sarasvati milieu as the home of the Harappan Civilization. Thus it opens a new window to the
cultural content of the prehistoric period of the subcontinent.
The eminent personalities that have contributed
include Ashok Aklujkar, Shiva G. Bajpai,
Giacomo Benedetti, R.S. Bisht,
Edwin Bryant, Michel Danino, Subhash
Kak, Robin Bradley Kar, Nicholas Kazanas, Mark [onathan Kenoyer, Prem Kishore Saint, Jim J. Shaffer, Diane A. Lichtenstein, Shrikant Talageri, Lavanya Vamsani as well as Sundara Adiga, S.R. Rao, and Nalini Rao.
This volume is poised to evoke keen interest among
archaeologists, re- searchers, historians and students of history and
archaeology.
About the Author
Nalini N. Rao, Ph.D. in Art History (UCLA) and Ph.D. in Ancient History and
Archaeology (University of Mysore) is Professor of World Art in Soka University of America, Aliso
Viejo, CA, USA. She is the author of many books, some of which include Royal
Imagery and Networks of Power at Vijayanagara: A
Study of Kingship in South India (2010), Sangama:
A Confluence of Art and Culture during the Vijayanagara
Period (ed. N.
Rao 2005), Contours of Modernity: An Exhibition of
Contemporary Indian Art (N. Rao and Debashish Banerji,
2005), Boundaries and Transformations: Masterworks of
Indian and South East Asian Sculptures from the Collection of Dr. and Mrs.
William Price (1997),
Belur (1979, 1990), and Sravanabelagola (1980). She is the
Chairperson of Dr. S.R. Rao Foundation for Indian Archaeology, Art and Culture.
Foreword
The memorial volume honouring Dr S.R. Rao had its
origins in a conference on “Sindhu- Sarasvati Valley Civilization” held at Loyola Marymount
University, USA, on 21-22 February 2009. It was sponsored by the Bridge Builder
Endowment of the Loyola Marymount University and Nalanda
International, both of which I have the good fortune of founding and
supporting. The conference was meant to be a reappraisal featuring the most
recent research on the subject, looked at from different disciplines, but it
was also meant to be a felicitation for Dr S.R. Rao, who was eighty-seven years
old that year, and had travelled to Los Angeles from India to attend the
conference. At eighty- seven, he was remarkably well kept and his mind was as
sharp as a razor. No one could forget his enormous contributions to our
understanding of this earliest civilization of South Asia, his discovery of a
large number of its sites, his revolutionary excavation of the port city of Lothal in the 1950s and 1960s, his opening of the field of
Marine Archaeology and its use to establish the existence of Krsna’s underwater city of Dvaraka
in 1979-80 and his continuing work on the decipherment of the Sindhu- Sarasvati script, showing
it to be a Sanskritic language. On the occasion, Dr
Rao spoke of his most recent work on the script, with detailed reasoning on his
decipherments. In 2013, Dr Rao departed from the physical plane, but his legacy
continues in a many- directioned advance towards the
establishment of many of the intuitions he had about this civilization. This
volume represents some of that large body of work that continues in the vast
shade of his banyan-like erudition and eminence.
The essays here represent the state-of-the-art in
research on Sindhu-Sarasvati Civilization, an amazing
settlement which flourished 5,000 years ago, establishing itself as the largest
and most sophisticated urban culture in history. The ruins of this impressive
civilization are twice the size of the Egyptian and Sumerian societies
combined. The fact that these proto-historic remains exist today in two nations
separated by a common partition makes one pause to consider how so much of our
world is divided and even antagonized by differences of religion, economics,
philosophy and politics. It makes us rewind into our own origins and also fast
forward to the increasing Technological prowess of contemporary humans and
their ability to probe their own hidden pasts. If we travel thus back in time,
we discover that each of us comes from a common ancestry that makes us all
related. Through genetic studies, we know today, that the most distant we are
to anyone in the world is 50th cousin.
We could ponder our earliest ancestors originating
in Africa and imagine the first tribes of Homo sapiens migrating therefrom to
Asia, to India and on to Indonesia and further East. Concurrently, we would see
these same ancestors parting and migrating north to China and America in the
East and to Europe in the West. We could imagine how future generations from
this common origin began to divide into many tribes. Soon the tribes lost the
knowledge of their origin and taking each other to be different began warfare
for domination. Later, rulers arose with the imperial urge to control large
territories and many peoples, and spread into empires that colonized most of
the world. Abridged histories are written - often by the rulers of the time or
the nations that dominated those moments in our past. Still, these nations,
these civilizations all started as one.
As we return to recent times, our eagerness for
knowledge has brought us the discovery that we are all intimately connected.
Through the internet, cell phones and GPS systems, our physical and cultural
separations are giving way to the possibility of a knowledge
of unity. This ‘‘body of humanity” is expanding its awareness in every field of
human endeavour. The conference on the Sindhu-Sarasvati
Civilization was another example of this expansion of knowledge. Though
ostensibly we turned our gaze on the antiquity of South Asia, the ancestors of
the peoples of the Indian subcontinent, it was in reality another chapter of
the story of a common humanity that we gathered together to decipher, in the
spirit of Dr Rao’s archaeological excavations on
earth and sea, an excavation without bias for universal knowledge.
Both in piecing together the stories of the
different peoples of the earth, and in the disciplinary approaches taken to
piece together each of these stories, we resemble the
blind men of Hindustan spoken of in the Upanisads, each with their fixed belief
in their interpretation of the elephant that confronted them. This has been the
story of specialization in the modem world. But as we enter the twenty-first
century, we find ourselves embarking on a new curve of the circle, the inward
curve of integration. The way here is to collaborate and synthesize the results
of the varied knowledge workers, attempting to provide an integral description
from the piecemeal knowledge. Dr Rao set the example for this spirit, utilizing
varied tools, intuitional, hermeneutic, technological and cross-disciplinary to
arrive at a coherent understanding of the province of knowledge he set for
himself. The papers in this volume are marked by this spirit of synergy and
coherence. Evidence is probed for consistency; inconsistent results are
re-examined. Integration of diverse approaches obtained from
different fields of endeavour is attempted to bring forth the true image of the
invisible” elephant in the room”, the vast civilization that disappeared along
with the missing river Sarasvati.
Finally, though Dr Rao’s
death is a great loss for all of us, I am heartened to see so much goodwill and
enthusiasm among the present-day scholars who have submitted their research to
honour their great forerunner; and most of all, the work done by Dr Rao’s daughter, Dr Nalini Rao,
for her tireless efforts in approaching the scholars for the conference and
later editing their papers to consolidate the present volume. My thanks go out
to her. My thanks also to Prof. Debashish
Banerji, Executive Director of Nalanda
International for his organization and scholarship, which have gone into the
conference and this volume; and to Prof. Chris Chapple,
Doshi Professor at Loyola Marymount University, for
arranging for the conference venue and helping with the complex logistics.
Preface
Anyone who attended the international conference Sindhu-Sarasvati Valley Civilization: A Reappraisal”, held
in Los Angeles, California, USA on 21-22 February 2009, could not fail to be
impressed by the level of discussions, the scholarship of the speakers and the
enthusiastic support of the audience. The conference was about the nature of
the two most ancient prehistoric cultures of the South Asian subcontinent: the
Indus (Sindhu) or Harappan
Civilization, which has been solely reconstructed from archaeological material,
and the Vedic Civilization, largely known from Vedic literature preserved
through oral tradition. The aim of the conference was a reappraisal of the
place of Vedic culture within the Indus cultural system in the light of new
pieces of evidence. It was a search for an objective historical interpretation
that would provide a substantial understanding about the nature of
interrelation between the two cultures, an issue that has intrigued scholars
for the past fifty years. It was felt necessary to confront the issue of the
overlapping of the Indus Valley Civilization and Vedic culture, and let
prominent scholars re-examine recent research and
existing theories and arrive at a consensus. The presentees
in the conference included eminent archaeologists, philologists,
anthropologists, historians and specialists in religious studies whose
historical analysis was rooted in years of scholarship and fieldwork. They
touched upon areas of consensus and contentions, with a tentatively conclusive
interdisciplinary understanding revolving around the riverine
cultures of the Indus and Sarasvati. In other words,
it was centred upon primary archaeological and linguistic groups of evidence
that could throw light on the pluralistic culture between 3000 and 1500 BCE.
The specific issues examined ranged from origins to evolution dispersal,
ecology, genetics, language, socio-cultural identities and continuities between
the prehistoric and historic periods.
Those who participated in the conference do not by
any means exhaust the list of specialists. Many colleagues were unable to
participate but were kind enough to send their articles, which have been
included in the volume; needless to say the volume would have been incomplete
without their support. Our sincere appreciation to the participants: Ashok Aklujkar, Shiva Bajpai, RS. Bisht, Edwin
Bryant, Subhash Kak,
Jonathan Mark Kenoyer, S.R. Rao, Prem
Saint and [im G. Shaffer. Our sincere thanks
to the panel moderators, Damodar Sardesai,
Emeritus Prof. of History, UCLA, and Mathew, Dillon, of Loyola Marymount
University (LMU), William Fulco, Director of LMU’s
centre for Archaeology who were responsible for initiating an extended
discussion. Our sincere thanks also to Giacomo
Benedetti, Michel Danino, Robin Bradley Kar, Lavanya Vemsani,
Diane A. Lichtenstein and Shrikant Talageri who were kind enough to send their articles which
have been included. The conference was generously funded by Nalanda International, and we thank its founding director, Navin Doshi, and Pratima Doshi. My heartfelt
thanks to Christopher Chap pie, Professor of Religious Studies at LMU, who was
responsible for hosting the conference and to Debashish
Banerji for creating the website. I am particularly
grateful to Shiva Bajpai and Ashok Aklujkar for their constant support and guidance.
My role in the conference as its director was to
invite scholars, co-ordinate the topics and to provide a title to the
conference. In regard to the production of the book, I have merely collected
the written papers and handed them to the publisher without making any changes.
The abstracts of the papers have been written by the authors themselves and
vary in size as well. For the sake of convenience to readers, they have been
placed after the Introduction and not at the beginning of each paper. I have
allowed the articles to speak for themselves after providing a very brief
introduction to this complex topic. My initial objective was to publish a
felicitation volume to my father, Dr. S.R. Rao, since he has devoted his entire
life to archaeology. He knew that a Festschrift was going to be published in
his honour. However, unfortunately he did not live to actually hold a copy of
it in front of his eyes or in his hands. He was kind enough to send his
(already) published writing on Indus script and language, with certain
revisions. Thus it has been included in a separate section, “Something From and
About S.R. Rao”, which has a different format from the other papers in this
volume. In this section are included an article by Sundara
Adiga who has written about his reminiscences of S.R.
Rao and a brief note on S.R. Rao’s life and
personality by me.
The articles in the book have been arranged in
alphabetical order as they defy division into conventional sub-headings or
topics. The papers vary in size as the objective of the book was to allow
scholars to explain their findings in the best possible way, ensuring academic
freedom and objectivity. This is how my father taught me to view scholarship,
with respect and open-mindedness.
Introduction
The very title “Sindhu-Sarasvati
Civilization”, which we are not familiar with, draws attention to the fact that
there is a whole area of interpretive historical research that has evolved from
the earlier title of “Indus Valley and Vedic Civilizations”. It raises
questions as to whether it is necessary to rename the Indus Valley Civilization
as Sindhu-Sarasvati Civilization. The reason for such
a change lies in the gradual paradigm shift that has occurred (knowingly or
unknowingly) during the past fifty years due to the incredible advances in our
knowledge and pursuit of rigorous research by a variety of scholars:
archaeologists, anthropologists, philologists and historians. The secondary
literature has grown to be unwieldy, intriguing and extremely complex. This
volume, with its divergent opinion, comes at a crucial time when a cohesive,
updated picture of the earliest South Asian civilization is a necessity.
The title brings together two separate
civilizations, Indus and Vedic, that have been
interpreted as foreign vs. indigenous, superior vs. inferior, Aryan/Sanskritic vs. Dravidian, urban vs. rural, illiterate vs.
literate, respectively. However, a dramatic change in our understanding of this
shared civilization has occurred during the past decade. A brief historical
background of the contentious nature might help us to understand the
substantial issues that lie behind the paradigm shift.
The story of the beginnings of Indian civilization
is still told by Indians by recitations and repetitions of the word “Sarasvati”. On the banks of this river were composed many
of the Vedic hymns, among which the rgveda mentions the river Sarasvati more than sixty times as the most auspicious or
as deserving of the highest praise. Interpretation of the roots of Indian
civilization changed when it was announced that a more ancient civilization had
been discovered by Daya Ram Sahni and R.D. Banerjee and later excavated by Sir John Marshall (1922-31) and E.J.H. Mackay at Mohenjo-Daro and by Vats at Harappa.
While Marshall was inclined to name it Indo-Sumerian Civilization, Mackay
called it Harappa Civilization, as Harappa was the first site to be discovered.
However due to its marked differences from the Mesopotamian cities, Marshall
changed the title to Indus Civilization due to its proximity to the river
Indus.
However, even before the unearthing of the two
sites, in 1785, Sir William Jones discovered that a number of languages such as
Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Gothic, Celtic, Old German, and Persian had a common
origin. Hence he gave it the name Indo- European/Indo-Germanic languages. Thus
began a pursuit to locate the homeland of the Indo-European-speaking people
outside India which was fixed in South Russia/ Central Asia. With further
excavations at the two sites, there grew a desire to know the place of origin
of these languages, and their relation to Vedic culture. The latter with its
superior Sanskrit language and grammar led to the theory that one branch of
Indo- European language group probably left their homeland around 2000-1200 BCE, migrated to Iraq, Iran,
Baluchistan and settled in Sapta-Sindhu, the land of
seven rivers, where they composed the Rgveda. It was asserted that the
Indus Civilization was pre- Aryan and charged the Vedic Aryans with destroying
the urban cities of Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro on the river Indus. The Aryan
Invasion Theory (AIT) was archaeologically constructed on the basis of a few
skeletons reported to have been found scattered in Mohenjo-Daro and by relating
the rgvedic term pur to the fortifications in
Indus cities which were destroyed by invading Vedic Aryans.’ In the 1960s, a
careful examination revealed that neither did the skeletons belong to one and
same stratigraphical context nor was there any proof
of any massacre. Most of the skeletons positively showed that the few were
drowned in severe and sudden flood in the river and there was no evidence of
warfare; while the literary interpretation of the word pur was wrong thereby proving
that there was no battle between the Aryan and Dravidians. Linguistically, the
theory claimed that a group, speaking an Indo- Aryan language, a sub-branch of
the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European family of languages, had invaded
India in 1200 BCE
and imposed the
Sanskrit language. This led to the dating of the J3.gveda to c. 1500 BCE.2 However no such event has been recorded in the Vedas
or Puranas, Thus, with no literary or archaeological proof, or collective
memory, mythology or cult, the theory was proved to be misconstrued. In the
meantime its ramifications had been tremendous.
With the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947,
archaeological sites similar to Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro were discovered and
scientifically excavated in India, such as at Lothal,
Kalibangan. Chanhu-Daro, Rakhigarhi, Dholavira
and Surkotada. Almost 2,400 settlements came
to be known beyond the banks of the river Indus, and soon the Indus
Civilization came to be known as the Indus Valley Civilization. The Vedic-Harappan dichotomy was modified by Aryan Migration Theory,
which contended that there were no invaders but migrants in small batches at
different points of time and spread over a long duration and believed to have
migrated from Ukraine, through Ontic
steppes, Turkmenistan, northern Afghanistan to India. The migration theory
claimed that the dasas, panis of the Indus Civilization
were also outsiders and Indo-Aryan speakers, speaking a dialect different from
the one used by the Aryans.
Several archaeological cultures were identified with
the migrating Indo-European speakers on their way to India, such as Pit, Hut
and Early Timber and Andronovo cultures, but, more
importantly, the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological
Complex (BMAC). BMAC is a Bronze Age culture that was discovered during
archaeological excavations in the Bactria-Margiana area.’ Bactria includes the basis
of the Amu Darya or Oxus River in northern Afghanistan and adjacent
south-eastern Uzbekistan and Margiana, the deltaic
region of the river in south Turkmenistan. Proof of the migration of the
Indo-Europeans from BMAC was claimed to have been provided by artefacts in Mehrgarh-VIII and at Sibri
(typical of BMAC) and Jukar Culture of Sindh and Gangetic Copper Hoards.
The authors of the BMAC were believed to be the dasas and the destroyers of the
strongholds (puras) described in the J3.gveda, relating
to the Arya- Dasa wars in Central Asia.’ The BMAC and
related minor theories regarding the flow of the Sarasvati
in Afghanistan also negatively impacted the study of Indus Valley Civilization.
AIT had been proved as false as early as 1964 by Dales, Rao, Lal and rejected by Shaffer, Kenoyer,
Hemphill, Lukacs and Kennedy, Elst,
and Danino. With a shift towards the indigenous
nature of the civilization, an out of India theory arose which was expressed in
different ways. It held that the Rgveda was part of an earlier layer
of world civilization that flourished before the rise of ancient Egyptian,
Sumerian and Indus Valley Civilizations. Based on a more logical linguistic
interpretation are those who date the composition of the Rgveda to pre-3150 BCE. They propose that the
Mesopotamian cultures were the borrowers from Indian cultures particularly in
the use of bricks, rituals, astronomy, mathematics, writing, and mythological
concepts.
Meanwhile, in 1993 a dramatic
evidence in the form of lands at imagery exposed the palaeochannels
which provided a scientific evidence of the drying of the historical river Sarasvati, around 1900 BCE. This initiated a rethinking of existing theories by providing a firm
time-period to the origins, evolution and decline of the Indus/Vedic
civilization(s), thereby altering the paradigm of the debate. The discovery of
many more Indus Valley sites infused a new spirit into the controversy about
AIT. It was found that more Indus sites existed on the dry bed of river Sarasvati than on the river Indus. No longer were Indus
sites restricted to Indus Valley, but extended to Baluchistan with 129 sites
(belonging to Mature Phase), 108 in Sindh, 310 in
Gujarat, 60 in Pakistan Punjab, 360 sites on river Sarasvati.
In other words, about 32 per cent of the total sites were on the dry bed of the
Sarasvati basin which comprised of Harayana, Indian Punjab, north
Rajasthan and Cholistan. The correlation of the two
cultures in space and time initiated a change in the title, from Indus Valley
to Indus-Sarasvati Civilization, taking into
consideration the existence of a large number of Indus Valley sites on the
banks of the Sarasvati than on the Indus.” This piece
of scientific evidence buried the earlier theory, and shifted the focus to an
indigenous, singular civilization, whose origins and heartland were on the
river Sarasvati.
The discovery of the river Sarasvati
had important repurcussions for historical research.
It provided an incentive to re-examine the reasons for the location of 80 per
cent of nearly 2,600 archaeological sites. It helped to prove that the loss of Sarasvati was later than the Vedic age, thereby
contradicting AIT. In addition, it showed that the J3.gveda must have been composed not
in 1500 BCE (after the drying of the
river around 1900 BCE,
but must have
been composed while the river was still flowing, joined by its tributaries,
Yamuna and Sutlej, which should be nearer 2000 BCE or even earlier, as the river was in full flow in
about 3000 BCE. This analysis has been made
possible primarily
Contents
|
Foreword
- Navin Doshi |
v-vii |
|
Preface |
ix-x |
|
Introduction
- Nalini Rao |
1-7 |
|
Abstracts |
8-17 |
|
Part I |
|
|
Something From and About
S.R. Rao |
|
1. |
The
Language and Script of the Indus Civilization |
19-62 |
|
-
S.R. Rao |
|
2. |
S.R. Rao’s Academic Personality: My Reminiscences |
63-73 |
|
- Sundara Adiga |
|
3. |
Dr
S.R. Rao As I Knew Him |
74-88 |
|
- Nalini Rao |
|
|
Part II |
|
|
Articles |
|
4. |
Sarasvati Drowned: Rescuing Her from Scholarly Whirlpools |
89-187 |
|
-
Ashok Aklujkar |
|
5. |
“Sapta Sindhusu”: The Land of
Seven Rivers: A New Interpretation and Its Historical Significance |
188-219 |
|
-
Shiva G. Bajpai |
|
6. |
The
Chronology of Puranic Kings and Rgvedic
Rsis in Comparison with the Phases of the Sindhu-Sarasvati Civilization |
220-246 |
|
- Giacomo Benedetti |
|
7. |
The
Debate on Indo-Aryan Origins: Malleability and Circularity |
247-264 |
|
-
Edwin Bryant |
|
8. |
How Harappans
Honoured Death at Dholavira |
265-318 |
- R.S. Bisht |
||
9. |
New Findings in Harappan Town Planning and Metrology |
319-339 |
- Michel Danino |
||
10. |
Time, Space and Structure in
Ancient India |
340-355 |
- Subhash
Kak |
||
11. |
The Riverine-Agricultural
Argument for the Indo-European |
356-470 |
Nature of the Indus Valley
Civilization |
||
- Robin Bradley Kar |
||
12. |
Rgveda
Pre-dates the Sarasvatt-Sindhu Culture |
471-499 |
- Nicholas Kazanas |
||
13. |
New Perspectives on the Indus
Tradition: Contributions |
500-535 |
from Recent Research at Harappa
and Other Sites in |
||
Pakistan and India |
||
- Jonathan Mark Kenoyer |
||
14. |
Paleohydrology of the Sindhu-Sarasvati Civilization |
536-555 |
River Systems |
||
- Prem
Kishore Saint |
||
15. |
Settlement Dynamics in Ancient
India: |
556-571 |
Continuity vs. Discontinuity |
||
- Jim G. Shaffer and Diane A.
Lichtenstein |
||
16. |
The Sindhu-Sarasvati
Civilization alias the |
572-593 |
Indo-Iranian Civilization |
||
- Shrikant
Talageri |
||
17. |
Genetic Evidence of Early Human
Migrations in the |
594-621 |
Indian Ocean Region Disproves
Aryan Migration/Invasion |
||
Theories: An Examination of
Small-statuted Human Groups of the Indian Ocean
Region |
||
- Lavanya
Vamsani |
||
Contributors |
622-630 |
|
Index |
631-664 |